


Bestride the World

by architeuthis



Category: DC Extended Universe, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 20:07:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15714189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/architeuthis/pseuds/architeuthis
Summary: A visit to the Isle of Rhodes tests Diana's strength.





	Bestride the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [natacup82](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natacup82/gifts).



> So, I heard you like adventures, female friendship, and Diana's past! You've come to the right place!

An enormous bronze fist descended through sheets of rain. Diana leapt out of its path, but the shock of its impact caught her in midair and tumbled her head-over-boots. She fetched up against a wet boulder and raised her shield just in time to deflect a shower of rock shrapnel.

The other fist plummeted toward her. She took the full brunt of the blow on her shield; the force of it disintegrated the boulder, and the ground beneath her. There would be a woman-shaped depression where she lay, when she stood. It was already filling with rainwater.

Her opponent had no intention of permitting her to rise, now that it had pinned her beneath its immense hand. It ground her into the rock as though she were an unfortunate spider. Diana sought for leverage against the wet ground with her feet, but couldn't move her legs enough under the metal heel of the automaton's hand to find the purchase she needed. She let go of her sword instead, for an additional hand to brace against the back of her shield, and pressed upward.

The strength for such a feat did not come to her all at once. Even at rest, Diana was stronger than any human, any Amazon; even buttoning a shirt or writing a letter, she knew that her hands could crush stone, that her skin could reject a bullet. But the full divine strength of her heritage was present only when she reached for it. Diana pushed and it flooded into her. She pushed, baring her gritted teeth, with her muscles taut and her nerves scintillating. She pushed and her shield rose one inch, then another.

Now she could get her legs beneath herself; she crouched in the hollow her body had made in the ground, with her shield above her head and the huge metal man still trying to press her down into the earth with its fist. It took everything she already had to keep her body from buckling; she would need more.

— briefly, through the shifting curtains of the rain, Diana thought she saw a smear of white.

Yes, there it was. A figure dressed in the pale clothing of summer, bobbing in her vision as it clambered up the grassy rock slope that led down to the beach. The automaton's towering bronze legs framed it in her vision.

Who would be out in this weather? And who would spy a woman with shield and sword fighting a seventy-foot automaton, and run _toward_ them? Most of the people of Rhodes had retreated to their homes when night fell and the storm began; Diana had fought and fought to draw her opponent down to the shore, far from the low roofs and bright windows of nearby Apolakkia village. Here the storm would swallow the sparks and clangor of battle, and there were no potential casualties — except perhaps for the one running toward her now, slipping and staggering on the wet ground.

No casualties, and no witnesses. She had not planned to don her red and blue armor again, not after less than fifteen years, maybe not ever. She had meant to be a scholar. If she must be a warrior again, at least she could do it unseen.

The automaton applied its other hand to the back of the first and bore down on Diana's shield with new force. Her legs buckled; her knees splashed down into the puddle at her feet, and she felt stone crack beneath her shin guards. The metal plates of the automaton's hand squealed against her shield. Rain curtained off the shield's edge. The pale smudge of a person came closer through the storm. Perhaps they were shouting something to Diana; in all this din she wasn't sure.

Diana put her shoulder to the underside of her shield and shoved. Metal strained in the automaton's arm, and the shield rose an inch or two, then held against the tremendous downward pressure of the automaton's hands. She got her feet under herself again and aligned her back, shoulders, hips. She breathed: out, in.

The crackling power of the divine was there in her, waiting, and she called it fully out into her body with a long scream of effort. In one movement she rose to her full height and shoved her shield skyward, to the full extension of her arms.

Sparks flew where the edges of the automaton's bronze cladding overlapped; there was a thunder of tormented metal and, Diana thought, snapping wood. She had jammed the mechanisms of the automaton's arm-joints into one another in a manner its creator had not intended; it held its arms stiffly away from its body as though it could not un-straighten them from their outstretched position.

The momentum of Diana's shove sent it staggering backward. One of its bronze-sandaled heels sought purchase on the slope down to the furious sea; it came down with a force that pulverized the rock beneath it. The other foot came next, but it landed on a boulder that turned under the bronze sole instead of shattering.

The automaton had the serene, mathematically perfect face of an ancient statue, surrounded by curls of hammered metal. Its immobile features could not emote surprise or dismay as it toppled.

Beyond the falling machine and the pounding rain still stood the inexplicable human figure Diana had spotted in the storm. Whoever it was, they were waving something above their head, hopping in place as though desperate to be noticed. The automaton seemed perfectly oblivious to their presence, and probably did not care that it was about to land on this person.

Diana descended the slope in great bounding leaps, traversing dozens of feet at a go. There was no time to be gentle with the interloper — a young woman, Diana saw as she approached, whose short hair and collared shirt were plastered to her body by rain. Diana's arm drove the breath out of her when Diana caught her by the waist and snatched her out of harm's way.

The automaton struck the ground in stages: legs, torso, head. Each one rattled the earth. As the first shock hit them, Diana skidded to a halt behind the slight shelter of a ridge, and raised her shield to catch the rock shards and soil that fell around her and her charge. Diana's teeth rattled with the second shock, then the third. They breathed dust — at least, Diana did; the young woman was still fighting to get her breath back — for a moment, until the rain cleansed the air of it.

"What the hell are you doing!" the young woman wheezed. "You've broken him!"

She said it in Greek, with the local accent. Diana knew that voice, though the wind and rain did their best to snatch it away. She took a second look at the woman's face. Yes — the engineer from the dig site outside Apolakkia, who she had overheard shouting about the stress on an excavator this morning, another woman among mostly men. She'd been wearing the same knickerbockers she had on now, and a cap. Diana had wanted to stop and talk, until her visit to the dig site was derailed.

The object the engineer been waving above her head earlier was familiar, too. A metal tablet, pitted with age. Diana had seen it only in the grainy photo that had accompanied the request for her expertise; the artifact itself had vanished from its box of soft hay just before she arrived to authenticate it. The engineer had stood by and watched the scramble to find it with the cheerful indifference of someone whose job was not on the line for this disaster — and here she was, clutching the tablet to her chest under the shelter of Diana's shield. This rain would not be good for it.

"Could you have stopped him _without_ breaking him?" shouted Diana, over the storm.

The engineer's furious expression wavered. That was a _Maybe_ , but what she said was, "Obviously, that's why I'm here!"

"I'm glad you came, then," said Diana, climbing out of their small refuge. The automaton's clanks and groans carried even through the ambient roar of the storm: it was down, not dead, and it was trying to find its feet. "I may need your help."

Her sword still lay in the hollow where the automaton had tried to crush her. It could wait. She slung her shield on her back and uncoiled her lasso from her hip; the rain around her glittered in its light.

The engineer skidded and stumbled after Diana on the slope back up toward the automaton. She wasn't tall, and had to hurry to keep up. "Wait!" she was saying. "He just can't hear me! Can you get me close enough to talk to him?"

"What do you intend to say?" asked Diana, though she had a few guesses. She hadn't looked closely enough at the marks on the tablet to read them, but it was obvious enough that they were words, that they were ancient, and that the script was not Greek but wasn't far off either.

"Well...." The engineer waggled the tablet at her and uttered three short, percussive words. Diana knew none of them, unusually, but she felt each as clearly as she felt the buffeting wind. For an instant, an ancient voice she knew but had never heard before came to her from the tongue of this young woman; the sound of it called to the same part of herself she had invoked to bring the automaton down. If the metal man staggering to its feet thirty yards away were not proof enough, there was no doubt in Diana's mind now that she beheld the creation of a god.

"What is it?" the engineer added, shouting it over a long roll of thunder.

Diana must have looked as floored as she felt. With the Lasso of Hestia still hanging in bright loops from her hand and forearm, she reached out to touch the tablet with her fingertips. It was warm beneath the rainwater that sheeted down its pitted surface.

The engineer stepped back, maneuvering the tablet just out of reach as though she thought Diana might try to take it from her. Diana shook herself; the colossus would be on them again in a moment. She knew what to do now.

"Wait right here," she said.

The automaton had just about found its feet, though one arm projected stiffly and the other swung and rattled as though the mechanisms would no longer engage. Its fists were out of the equation, but when it saw Diana approaching, it oriented on her at once and tried to raise a foot to crush her with. Its balance shifted wrong and the foot came down nowhere near her, throwing up gravel and shredded grass.

From the moment she had spotted it through the storm, crowned in thunderheads and swinging its fists at the tops of trees like a destructive child, Diana had thought about little other than coaxing it away from the village and neutralizing its mindless rampage. She hadn't had time to reflect about where this thing, this not-creature, must have come from or why it existed. But of course this would be a creation of slain Hephaestus, a weapon from the era when Amazons rode to war alongside gods and great otherworldly powers. Perhaps the archaeological dig outside Apolakkia had unearthed it, or this young engineer had discovered it in the caves that dotted the cliffside above the dig. When she brought it together again with the tablet that controlled it, it had resumed executing some violent instruction forgotten by everyone on Earth but it.

There was a moment in some fights when Diana's blood ceased its singing, and the energy of the battle turned to pity. She didn't relish it.

The automaton shuffled its ponderous feet and tried again to lift one. This time it had its balance; it would stomp on her if she stayed put. Diana sprinted across the space that separated them, and leapt onto its ascending foot.

She very nearly slid off at once. The top of the machine's foot was a slick bronze slope that offered very little purchase. One of her feet found the edge of a sculpted sandal-strap, and she pushed herself upright against the machine's ankle. From down below she heard a faint, "What the _hell_?"

Diana flung her lasso. It described a brilliant arc through the rain and looped neatly around the metal man's neck; its glow made a band of warm brightness against the tarnished metal. Whatever sort of mind this thing had, it seemed not to have understood yet that its target was on top of the foot it had intended to flatten her beneath. The foot Diana clung to was still rising, the knee bending past ninety degrees.

At the apex, Diana leapt from the automaton's foot into the rain-lashed air, with the trailing end of her lasso still in one hand.

It caught at the back of the bent bronze knee and pulled taut, jerking her onto a new course. Diana bowed her whole body backwards as she flew, then forward, pushing new momentum into the swing just as the lasso caught again at the back of the second, still-straight knee. It flung her upward, higher than the foot she'd jumped from; she twisted in midair and caught the automaton's upraised knee as she passed it.

The machine knew something was wrong. It was still committed to stomping an annoyance that no longer lay at its feet, but its shoulders twitched as it tried to bring its hands to bear on its passenger. Its rigid arm protested with alarming clangs and pops; the limp one slammed uselessly against its side. Whether it intended to brush her off or disentangle itself from the lasso now looped around the backs of its legs, she couldn't say.

She hauled herself to her feet atop the vast, slippery metal thigh, then leapt again just as the foot began its descent. Her hands found a gap in the plates around the elbow of the limp arm, and she clung on, by fingers and knees, as the automaton completed its stomp. The experience was very different up here, hanging from the machine's body, than it had been on the ground. It was like clinging to the clapper of an immense bell: the arm she hung from collided deafeningly with the automaton's side again, striking a note that overwhelmed her thoughts for a moment as it rang out across the rainy beach. The combined sounds, metal on stone and metal on metal, might have been loud enough to be heard all the way back in sleeping Apolakkia, even if only to be dismissed as strange thunder.

Diana was glad again that she had thought to draw the automaton away from town, instead of squaring off with it at once when she found it wandering at the outskirts. She had learned a great deal since venturing into the world beyond Themyscira's shield of illusion, and falling in with spies.

The automaton was regrouping — trying to look down at her, though its head did not bend that far. The loop of lasso about its neck underlit its serene features. Diana pulled herself higher, hooking her fingers over rivets, over sculpted muscles and veins, over the edges metal plates that moved loosely now against their neighbors, half-unmoored by damage. She put the end of the lasso in her mouth to free her hand, held its celestial fire between her teeth. The machine turned ungainly circles as she climbed, as though it still could not quite understand what had happened or how to to dislodge her. 

She surmounted the automaton's shoulder; pulling herself upright by the deeply-carved curls of its metal hair afforded her a brief look in through its ear, at the gears that churned in its head. Its body language made it abundantly clear that it would have swatted her away by now if it had the proper use of either of its arms.

Diana tossed another loop of her lasso around the automaton's neck. It ran in a figure-eight now, from neck to knees to neck. She planted her feet and pulled on the free end until she met resistance, then pulled more, drawing the lasso brutally tight. The effect was immediate: the vast metal body she stood upon curled in on itself ever so slightly. The sudden change in the footing almost threw her from her perch, but it also gave her the hope that her notion would work.

It happened foot by foot, arm-length by arm-length. Diana hauled in her lasso, winding it around her elbow and hand, and the automaton gradually buckled as the tension drew its head closer to its knees.

The lasso burned in her grasp — it always burned when she wielded it, with the familiar heat of truth and home. The mechanical man clearly could not speak, and perhaps it had no more thoughts than a simple animal did: attack, defend, find new things to attack or defend. She wondered anyway what it would say to her if it could, of what it had seen and done, of why it had been gone from the world for so long.

Its legs went out. Without its arms to catch it, it collapsed to its knees with a tremendous thudding and splashing; Diana lost her footing in the impact, and might have fallen from its shoulders if the lasso hadn't anchored her. The fall still slammed her full-length against its metal back, with her winding hand caught painfully against the back of the automaton's ear as it regained a little of the slack she had taken from it. Finding leverage again was a battle unto itself, but she got her feet under herself at last, planting one on the back of the automaton's head and the other on the nape of its neck.

Every foot of lasso she coiled around her arm drew the automaton's head closer to the ground, and every foot asked more of her strength. She could see the engineer on the ground, standing far too close, reaching up toward the great bronze face as it descended — she'd be hurt if Diana lost her grip.

So Diana must not lose her grip. She wound another length of lasso around her forearm; another, another. The automaton bent closer to the woman who stood below it; the rainwater that ran from its features poured over her raised hand. Nearly there. Diana reached for her strength and it came to her, a luminous torrent, a certainty of what her body could accomplish. She reached for more and there was more. She reached and—

It was the sky that answered her this time, with a long crooked finger of light that reached down to touch her gently on the forehead. She caught her breath as the fire of it filled her; steam rose from her skin, her bracers, the metal beneath her feet. Diana pulled at the lasso, and in a few seconds drew up a length of it that would have taken her laborious minutes, before the lightning. The automaton's head dipped low enough for a short woman to whisper in its ear.

As the thunder echoed away from them, Diana shouted down, "Now!"

The command words, the thoughts of a god preserved on metal, came to Diana as powerfully as they as they had before. She felt none of their compulsion; she was like a resonating string in an instrument, untouched but still alive with sound.

Under her boots, the fight ran from the automaton as though it were a vessel the engineer's voice had punctured. Diana relaxed her grip on the lasso, but the machine remained bowed. Its metal skin was still hot from the lightning, but no longer so hot the rain flashed into steam when they met. 

She freed her lasso from its neck and leapt down to the muddy ground. The engineer was touching the automaton's face, looking with wonder into its huge mechanical eyes. It was a blessing she hadn't been in contact with the metal when the lightning struck. Perhaps a literal blessing; that lightning had been all for Diana. She looked up when Diana approached.

"Don't laugh," she said, "but I _just_ realized you're that antiquities expert from this morning. "

"I look different with my hair down," Diana said helpfully.

It was the engineer who laughed after all.

* * *

She introduced herself as Eleni Katsarou and they immediately got to arguing.

"This was a fluke," she said, while Diana examined the tablet. They'd retreated to the lee of a boulder, but it wasn't keeping either of them dry. "He couldn't hear me in the storm. I would never have lost control of him otherwise. Storms are rare here, it's nothing to worry about."

"But loud noises aren't," Diana said distractedly.

The tablet's weathered surface bore the machine's name: _Talos 3_. Diana knew this name from her mother's stories and from her own studies, but if pressed, she couldn't have said until now that more than one of them had existed. So much of the era of Talos' creation was lost even to her own people, let alone to humankind.

Below the name were the command phrases — not words, just sounds, which summoned the voice of Hephaestus and turned Talos into a tool instead of a menace. It still knelt a hundred yards away on the beach, motionless, impervious to the rain.

"Then I'll keep him away from anything that's being dynamited!" said Eleni, rolling her eyes. "It won't be a problem."

Diana turned the tablet around in her hands. She understood the temptation. Part of her wanted to tuck Talos away in the cliffs again to sleep inert through another age of the world, and leave this island with the tablet in her hands as proof. Something to point to, on the rare occasion that someone could be told who she truly was and where she was from; something to corroborate her story.

_This is where I came from. This is made from the same stuff as me: a little bit of earth and a little bit of a god. My people are real. I am real._

It had been less than fifteen years. She had so much longer to endure in this beautiful world where no one knew her. All of time, perhaps.

"What about repairs?" she said.

"Easy. I've fixed him once already."

"With olivewood?" said Diana. "With bronze? With volcanic glass, just like he was made with? He's badly damaged."

"I'll ... figure something out," Eleni said, but Diana saw her waver.

"Will you keep him secret in a cave while you do all this? What will he do — what will be his function?"

Eleni hesitated. "You said he was made for a war against creatures from another world." She had gotten used to the idea quickly. "If there isn't one of those happening, does it really matter?"

"I think so," Diana said. "I think it matters to you, too, whether he sits deactivated in a cave, or patrols a beach every day, in the sun, in full view of good people who know what service he does for them. He can't do that here on Rhodes."

Eleni grimaced, and chewed on her thumbnail while she searched for a rejoinder. Diana had her now. She just needed one last push, and Diana thought she knew what it was.

"You can come with me to bring him home."

* * *

They got about halfway into stealing the yacht before Diana realized who it belonged to. 

She was at the business end of a private dock when the owner's identity struck her. The ship was half-unhitched. The storm was moving inland; a flash of lightning, much more distant than the one that had come down from the sky for Diana, had shown her the outline of the house at the dock's other end. When the archaeologist who had invited Diana here had written to her, he had sent her photos: of the tablet, of the dig site, of the island — of his house, where he had offered her lodging. She recognized the silhouette now, reversed against the night sky.

He had been pointedly solicitous with Diana, and quick to assure her, _repeatedly_ , that he knew the intellect of women was great and he had been certain all along that an accomplished one must occur in the field eventually.

"This is Dr. Sarantos' yacht!" she said.

Eleni cackled delightedly in the night.

* * *

With its ruined arms, Talos could not hold a rope. Diana knotted a harness around its chest instead, and let it draw them out to sea. Tall though it was, the waves closed over its head before long; an observer would have seen a small pleasure craft with its sails furled, cutting straight and fast through the water with no apparent propulsion and no one at the helm. Far below them, Talos ran across the sea floor at a quick jog.

It wasn't a short trip. Eleni assured Diana she would not be missed, and Diana, ultimately, came and went as she pleased. They passed the time extracting parts of each other's life stories. Eleni had a thousand questions about the worlds Diana moved in, and seemed surprised that Diana had just as many about her. They fished, with mixed success. Diana taught Eleni to play Go, and Eleni taught Diana some card games with interesting names. The rain had been subsiding as they set out; the skies were clear most of the way, until the fog came up.

Eleni's shout brought Diana up to the deck, with her heart in her throat. She had only had the outsider's view of the illusion that protected Themyscira once before, as she left, but there was no mistaking it. Twilight had descended so quickly it was a wonder she hadn't heard _that_ from belowdecks. Behind them was nothing but calm, open sea, but before them churned a fogbank so dense it looked like they might run aground on it. 

"Tell me this is it, and we aren't just about to be lost at sea," Eleni said; Diana smiled absentmindedly, and went to the bow to signal Talos to slow down with a yank on the rope.

They broke through the barrier half an hour later. Diana spent every minute of it at the rail, straining her eyes as though she might, through sheer desire, be the first in history to see through the artificial fog. Eleni was an uncharacteristically subdued shadow at her elbow.

The gloom gave way to sun with a sensation like a sigh, or like a child's soap bubble ever so gently popping. Themyscira leapt into view without preamble: white beaches and tall cliffs, green hillsides and stone buildings and deep, secret forests, all jumbled together by the tears that immediately pricked Diana's eyes. Eleni gasped, crossing through the bubble an instant after Diana had.

Horns sounded along the cliffs. They'd changed the coast watch intervals since Diana's departure. Good.

Diana unhitched Dr. Sarantos' little yacht from Talos; they began to lose momentum immediately. The automaton would walk to land and stop once it was no longer submerged, but — yes, here came two Amazons in a small, fast dinghy on an intercept course. Diana could see the moment they recognized her: the pilot's hand went slack on the rudder, and the arrow the passenger had nocked sagged.

They were close enough for the bow-woman's voice to carry over the water. "Princess — Princess Diana? You — you can't set foot here."

Oh no, oh no. It was Euboea. They had trained in the sword alongside each other, shared one-upmanship games, studied astronomy together. If she said anything funny, Diana might weep.

"I know," Diana called back. "We come to deliver an artifact from the forge of Hephaestus, the automaton Talos 3, for safekeeping and the defense of Themyscira." She pointed at the slight disturbance in the water where Talos' head would soon break through the waves. The horns were still blowing. It seemed like a great deal of fanfare, but Diana could hardly blame her sisters, considering what had happened last time ships had approached the beach. "It will surface there — it's too large to transport by ship. Catch."

The tablet of command words rested against the rail at Diana's feet. She wound up and threw it, with all her might, with all her care and precision. Euboea dropped her bow and leapt to catch it, like she had done a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, at play.

"I'm glad you're well," Diana called. "Give my love to — everyone. I won't—"

"Wait!" said Euboea. "Just wait a moment, Diana, for once in your life—"

The gates to the beach opened, and the cavalry of Themyscira rode forth. Diana forgot what she had been saying.

She knew them all, to a woman. She had ridden with them. She knew their horses, their stances in the saddle, which weapons they would have drawn first if this had been an invasion. And most of all, she knew Hippolyta, riding tall and golden at the point of the wedge. Diana felt each hoofbeat, and felt her heart break a little more with each one.

The army gathered at the shore, fanning out around their queen.

Words could not cross the distances that separated them. Diana was at a loss, until she remembered the weight of the diadem on her brow.

She took it from her forehead and raised it to the sun. She couldn't make out her mother's expression from here on the water, but a certainty swelled in her that Hippolyta would decipher this gesture at once — and, just as much, that she would understand what it meant when Diana lowered this artifact of their beloved Antiope, and placed it back on her head.

Hippolyta thrust her spear into the air, and a full-throated cheer went through the ranks of the army.

A small voice at Diana's elbow said, "That's the most amazing thing I've ever seen."

"Will you tell her?" said Diana, looking back down at Euboea.

"She knows," Euboea said. "But yes." Her voice trembled, and Diana willed her to hold it together, for the both of them. "Be well out there in that world, Diana."

"I am," Diana said.

Euboea nodded, bit her lip, and gestured to her pilot. The dinghy tacked away. Diana's eye strayed back to her mother, in time for her to see shock propagate through the cavalry when Talos' bronze head broke the waves halfway between the yacht and shore. Eleni laughed breathlessly.

Diana made herself turn away. She looked at the sky, at the waves, at her companion, at the mast: anything that was not looking back one more time.

"I still haven't taught you to sail," she said to Eleni, who gave a startled laugh.

"Oh shit, can we actually get this thing back to land?"

"It's not a one-person task," Diana said, "but I hear you're a quick study."

In the end, she did look back. Hippolyta remained at the shore, so close to the water that the waves broke around her horse's hooves, until the veil of illusion descended again between her and Diana, and Diana was once more the only Amazon in the world of men.


End file.
